Tell HN: Sombody Fix Email | Hacker News Reader

Tell HN: Sombody Fix Email

1 pointeuroclydon4 comments

Wouldn't it be great if an IMAP email client could automatically strip email attachments and store them in a file system, ideally DropBox, in a folder for each contact? I don't think all the turkeys I do business with are ever going to stop emailing me images and start using FTP.

If I had this feature, it would be easy to save emails indefinitely, b/c the space requirements would be minimal.

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You want people to use FTP? I haven't run any sort of FTP service in close to a decade. Whenever someone asks me to "FTP" something for them, or fetch a file via FTP it feels like I've just been set back a dozen years.

You could do what you describe with a procmail recipe, and/or about a dozen different mechanisms on a mail server. This would make more sense then asking your email client to process the message as you described, this is much more of a "server" task than a "client" task.

Of course I wouldn't ask a customer to FTP me files. They are going to email them to me no matter what. I just want the attachments stripped automatically. As for Procmail. Maybe it will come to that. I use gmail now in order to save all those hours administering my own email server. At least with the client idea, it has a chance to work for a lot of people. I do have my doubts that IMAP can handle stripping an attachment in place however.

all those hours administering my own email server

Huh? I administer my own email server, and have administered email servers for a few startups. It takes like an hour to set things up, and other than adding an account here and there or creating a mailing list, there is really no administration. I can't remember the last time I really did anything remotely approaching "administration" on my personal server.

I think sometimes it may be fear of the unknown, but when you control your mailserver, a lot of options open up to you that you can't get from a 3rd party provider.

Well, I just tried to send you an email to ask some advice on running an email server, but it got rejected:

Delivery to the following recipient failed permanently:

    brk@notoriousbrk.com

Technical details of permanent failure: Google tried to deliver your message, but it was rejected by the recipient domain. We recommend contacting the other email provider for further information about the cause of this error. The error that the other server returned was: 553 553 5.3.0 <brk@notoriousbrk.com>... >brk<@notoriousbrk.com. (state 14).

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